by Amy Ignatow
“Michael Donovan.”
“Eric Mathes.”
“Emma Lee.”
“Siouxsie Rudikoff.”
“Izaak Marcus.”
Nick looked at Jay. “These are all Company Kids.”
Jay wrinkled his brow. “That doesn’t make sense. If they were testing Company Kid blood they wouldn’t have needed to trick Farshad into giving his with a science field trip cover. Farshad’s mother works for Auxano. So does Daniesha’s, and her blood isn’t here. Ah,” he said, “here’s Farshad’s.” Jay wrapped the vial in a sock he had found in his backpack. Hopefully a clean sock.
“So why do they have all this other blood?” Nick wondered, looking at the vials. “They have the blood of every Company Kid I can think of except for Cookie’s. Why not Cookie? What’s so different about her?”
“She’s infinitely more ravishing.” Jay grabbed two more vials and put them into his backpack along with Farshad’s.
“What are you doing? Put those back!” Nick said. “Don’t be a creepy blood thief.”
“Hush now,” Jay said. “I think we should bring these to our dear Dr. Deery to see if there’s anything interesting about them.” He put his backpack on. “Mission accomplished. Now stop fretting and let me concentrate on sending beautiful thoughts to Daniesha.”
“You’re trying to reach her by thinking about Ed’s busted old car.”
“Anything can be beautiful if you put your mind to it. Let’s go.”
“Jay and Nick got the blood,” Cookie told Martina. They had used Dr. Rajavi’s access card to descend to the lowest floor of the building with Farshad and Abe, and then split up to look for Ed and Willis Fisher.
“Oh good,” Martina said. She looked through the small window of a door. “Empty.” They moved on to the next one. “Empty.”
Across the hall was a row of hooks with what looked like sound-cancelling headphones hanging off them. Cookie looked at Martina, who shrugged. Cookie stood on the tips of her toes to look into the window of a nearby door. “Huh,” she said.
“They look so fluffy,” Martina said.
“Wait, didn’t Dr. Deery say that he was working with rabbits? What if these are the rabbits?” Cookie asked.
“Should we take one?” Martina asked.
“You want us to steal a bunny?” Cookie asked.
“We’ll bring them to Dr. Deery so they can be reunited.” Martina tested the doorknob. “Look, it’s open,” she said, walking into the room. Cookie followed her, and the screaming began.
Cookie had never heard anything so loud in her entire life. It was as if the bunnies were shrieking directly into her brain. The pain in her head was intense, and she clasped her hands to her ears and turned to see Martina doing exactly the same thing. They stumbled out of the room and quickly shut the door behind themselves before dropping to the ground.
Cookie’s ears were ringing, and it took a moment for her to realize that there was sound coming out of Martina’s moving mouth. “What?” she asked.
“Can you hear me?” Martina asked. Her voice sounded like it was coming through a long, tinny tunnel.
“A little—can you hear me?” Cookie had no idea how loud or soft her voice was. Martina was looking at her and Cookie could see that she was scared. Her eyes flashed different colors; now brown, now gray, now green, now hazel, now a deep blue. Cookie crawled over to Martina and put her hand on the girl’s arm and leaned in to put her mouth closer to Martina’s ear. “Can you hear me now?” she asked. Martina nodded and seemed to calm down a little. She pointed to the row of sound-cancelling headphones on the wall.
“Well, that answered that question,” Cookie said, standing up. She felt wobbly, as if her balance was off. She helped Martina up and the two stumbled down the hall away from the bunny room. “Let’s not go back there,” Cookie said. Martina nodded.
They had checked out five more rooms before emergency lights in the hallways began to flash. Martina and Cookie looked at each other. “Did you touch anything?” Cookie asked. Martina shook her head and looked expectantly at Cookie. “I didn’t touch anything!” Cookie said. She could hardly hear her own voice.
Farshad and Abe were almost upon them before Cookie and Martina noticed them. They were running and half dragging a pale teenage boy in a hospital gown.
“RUN!” Farshad yelled at Cookie and Martina.
“What? Where? Why?”
“I used my thumbs to break down the door to his room and set off some sort of alarm! We have to get out of here!” Far down the hall Cookie could see two security guards running toward them. She turned and ran until Martina stopped at the row of headphones.
Martina grabbed Abe and put a pair of headphones over his ears. Cookie caught a pair that Martina threw at her. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” she asked, putting the headphones on as Martina tossed two more pairs to Farshad and the boy in the hospital gown. “WE HAVE TO RUN!”
“WE’RE GOING IN THE WRONG DIRECTION!” Martina yelled, and dragged Abe into the screaming bunny room. She emerged with a bunny in each hand and handed one to Cookie. She pointed the other one at the oncoming security guards.
Cookie watched as Martina’s bunny opened its mouth and the security guards careened to a stop and clutched their heads in pain. Cookie pointed her own bunny in the same direction and the agonized guards fell to the ground. Cookie turned to Martina, who pointed to the hallway beyond the twitching guards. Abe grabbed the Amish kid and threw him over his shoulder and they all ran, jumping over the bodies of the guards.
The sound-cancelling headphones were incredibly effective—Cookie couldn’t hear a thing as they ran through the hallways, and yet there was Jay’s voice in her head, shouting directions. TURN LEFT HERE! THE DOOR AT THE END OF THE HALL TO YOUR RIGHT! Cookie hurled herself at the door that opened up to a large parking lot and held it open as a beet-faced Abe carried the boy through. Farshad and Martina were close behind—
HELP!
Cookie turned around to see that another two guards had grabbed Jay. She panicked and hurled her bunny at them. The guards dropped Jay and fell to the ground while the bunny hopped around them and sniffed their twitching feet. Cookie grabbed Jay and yanked him out the door, where Farshad was waiting. Once they were out, he pressed his thumbs into the doorknob, squishing it like a marshmallow, and then did the same to the hinges before beckoning Jay and Cookie to run.
They tore off their glaringly white lab coats and threw them to the ground, and as they skittered through the dark parking lot Jay was babbling and Cookie was extra grateful for the headphones. They crashed through the tree line into the woods, where they were finally hidden from the lights of the Auxano parking lot. Now she couldn’t hear and she could hardly see. Cookie gingerly took off her headphones. Farshad did the same.
“What was that?” Jay yelled excitedly. Nick clasped his hand over Jay’s mouth.
Cookie was beginning to hear better but there was still an annoying whine in her head. Jay kept talking through Nick’s hand. “That hurt! Were those sonic rabbits? Did we just take out four armed security guards with bunnies???”
Cookie’s eyes widened. “Were those security guards armed?”
Farshad put his finger up to his lips. “You’re being really loud,” he said. Cookie wrinkled her nose at him. “We can talk about all of this when we’re safe.” He turned to Jay. “Did you get the blood?”
“What?” Jay asked, and Nick nodded.
Cookie took out her phone and used it as a flashlight to find the path through the woods that they’d used to get from Ed’s car to Auxano. As they reached the road Cookie could see the others, and was horrified to realize that Martina was still holding on to her rabbit.
“Your ears!” Cookie yelped. “Cover your ears!” She fumbled to put the headphones back on before noticing that Martina and the others had taken theirs off. Martina gestured for her to take them off.
“It’s okay,” she said, “Abe asked Howler to please be quiet, and she seeme
d amenable to his request.”
Cookie stared at the bunny, who wrinkled its nose at her. Jay took a step toward the bunny. Cookie grabbed a handful of his sweater to stop him. “Do. Not. Annoy. That. Bunny,” she growled. “We should probably get out of here. Fast.”
“What are we going to do with him?” Nick asked, looking at the Amish kid who was slumped against Ed’s car. “And did we get Ed? Is he here?”
“We didn’t see him,” Cookie said.
“Well, technically, no one can see him,” Jay pointed out. “So he might be with us RIGHT NOW.”
“No, he’s not,” Martina said. “We weren’t able to find him before the security alarms went off.”
“We can’t just leave him in there.” Nick said.
“We can’t go back,” Cookie said. “Even if they weren’t looking for us there’s an insane screaming bunny roaming the halls.”
“Then what are we supposed to do with his car? We can’t just leave it on the side of the road.” Nick said, and they all turned to look at Abe.
“Sis en ayland,” Abe breathed, clearly terrified.
Farshad opened the passenger side door and helped Willis Fisher into the car, gently buckling him in. “You can do this, man,” he said to Abe, awkwardly patting him on the back.
Martina climbed into the back of the car and buckled herself in. Cookie stared. “Wait, where are you going?”
Martina held up the rabbit. “Howler has to stay with Abe or else he might start screaming again.”
A car passed them on the darkened road, and Cookie became very aware of how exposed they all were. She got into the car. “We all need to go,” she said. “Turn on the headlights,” she told Abe.
“Smart. So smart!” Jay exclaimed, diving into the car and squishing up next to her. “This is nice,” he said.
“I am very not dealing with you right now.”
“Well, I’m the smallest anyway, so I’ll jump in the back.” Jay scrambled over the backseat into the hatchback trunk of Ed’s car. Farshad got in the car with a grim look on his face.
“This is insane. There’s no room!” Nick said, throwing his hands up in the air.
“Get in the car, old man!” Jay said.
“No. NO. This is not happening. I just broke into a highly secure corporate facility, aided and abetted in the stealing of blood, a rabbit, and an entire other human being, and now you want me to get into a car with five other people and a driver who has NEVER DRIVEN A CAR BEFORE. Does anyone else see how crazy—”
“STOP!” A white van that looked exactly like the one that had absconded with Mr. Friend a few days before had come to a screeching halt in front of them while Nick had been ranting. Four men in hazmat suits came out.
“YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING,” the lead hazmat said. “JUST COME WITH US AND EVERYTHING—”
“TAKE HOWLER!!!” Cookie screamed, grabbing Howler from Martina and holding her out to Nick. She clasped her hands over Nick’s ears as he took Howler from her and pointed the small, fluffy bunny at the men from the van.
“DON’T MAKE ME USE THIS!” Cookie heard Nick shout before hastily putting on her own headphones and returning her hands to his ears. She watched in horrified fascination as the men dropped to the ground, writhing in agony. Cookie scrambled to sit on Martina’s lap as Nick backed into the car.
GO GO GO! She saw Nick’s mouth form the words as he closed the door. Abe turned the key in the ignition and put his shaky hands on the gearshift. The entire car shuddered.
Cookie looked over to Howler, whose mouth was now closed. She took off her headphones and reached into the front seat to take off Abe’s. “PUT YOUR FOOT ON THE BRAKE BEFORE YOU SHIFT GEARS!” she yelled.
He complied and put the car in Drive. “Now what???”
Cookie could see the men from Auxano in the rearview mirror stumbling to get up.
“TAKE YOUR FOOT OFF THE BRAKE, PUT IT ON THE GAS PEDAL AND GET US OUT OF HERE!” she screamed.
Abe jammed his foot down and the car lurched forward, knocking Cookie backward. Martina grabbed her around the waist like a human safety belt as Cookie tried not to scream in fear.
“TURN! TURN AROUND!” Farshad yelled, his sound-cancelling headphones still on. “WE’RE HEADED STRAIGHT BACK TO AUXANO!”
Abe wrenched the steering wheel to the right and the car’s tires squealed angrily on the pavement as Ed’s car spun out of control. “BRAKE!!! BRAKE!!! OTHER PEDAL!” Cookie and Farshad yelled in unison, and the car came to a halt directly facing the Auxano van. The men in hazmat suits began running toward the car.
“GUN IT!” Farshad yelled.
“I DO NOT HAVE A GUN!” Abe screamed.
“GAS PEDAL! GAS PEDAL! THE ONE ON THE RIGHT! GO!!!” Cookie shrieked, and once again the car shot forward.
“WHEEEEEEE!!!” Jay screamed from the back of the car.
The Auxano men saw Ed’s car barreling toward them and threw themselves to the side of the road. “THE VAN!” Nick yelled, and Abe swerved to get out of the way but still scraped the entire side of the van and knocked off its sideview mirror. The sound of metal against metal was too much for Howler to handle and the poor bunny started screaming again. Martina instinctively clapped her hands over her ears, sending Cookie flying across Farshad’s and Nick’s laps. She grabbed the bunny from Nick. “SHUT UP, BUNNY!” she yelled. The bunny stopped.
“Did I do that?” she asked, astonished.
“No, I did,” Abe said. He was pale as a sheet but driving in a relatively straight line down the road.
“Good job,” Martina said. “Where are we going?”
“Lancaster.” Abe said. “We have to bring Willis to my sister.”
They all looked at the boy in the hospital gown who was giggling quietly to himself. “’S macht nix aus,” he said softly. “’S macht nix aus.”
Cookie crawled back over Farshad and Nick to get back on Martina’s lap. “This just keeps getting better and better.”
Howler nuzzled her chin as they drove through the night.
Nick fought to keep from throwing up. He’d never had the stomach for bad driving, and Abe clearly didn’t really know how to drive; Cookie and Farshad had to talk him through every step.
“That stick on the side of the steering wheel. Pull it down before you turn left.”
“And up before you turn right.”
“No, that’s the windshield wiper. The stick on the other side of the steering wheel.”
“Stop that. You can put your foot on the gas or the brake, but not both.”
Nick tried not to think too hard about the fact that the two people advising the unlicensed driver had also never driven a car, and they lurched through the back country roads until they got to the outskirts of Lancaster. Cookie used the map function on her phone to direct Abe to Rebecca’s, and with a deep sigh of relief he pulled Ed’s car into the driveway of his sister’s house and put it in park.
“That was magnificent!” Jay said, bounding out of the back. “Although I can’t say I’m pleased with the amount of sculpture tools that Ed seems to keep back here. They’re sharp. I’m injured. No matter! Good work, you glorious chauffeur.” He grabbed Abe’s hand and shook it vigorously as Abe slumped against the side of the car with a glazed look in his eyes. “And you were an exquisite navigator,” Jay added to Cookie, who rolled her eyes.
Nick smiled a little despite himself, and then went with Farshad to help Willis Fisher out of the car. The Amish teen was still muttering to himself in Pennsylvania Dutch and seemed incapable of walking without aid.
“Do you think they drugged him?” Nick asked Farshad as they walked up to the house.
“I don’t know what they did to him,” Farshad said, holding Willis awkwardly to avoid using his thumbs.
“I wonder what they’re doing to Mr. Friend,” Nick wondered. Farshad said nothing.
“Willis!” Rebecca exclaimed as they entered the apartment. She clutched her hands together fearfully and began speaking
in Pennsylvania Dutch with Abe, who seemed to be telling her the story of how they’d rescued Willis (and why her apartment was suddenly filled with strange people). A hulking teenage boy rushed up to them and gently led Willis to the ugly plaid sofa. Nick awkwardly stood nearby.
Abe had finished his story and Rebecca surveyed the group. “My brother and Willis can stay here but the rest of you have to get back home.”
“Uh, how, exactly?” Farshad asked.
Rebecca looked at the big guy who was putting a blanket over Willis. “Beanie can bring you back to Muellersville in the invisible man’s car,” she said, “he knows how to drive. And then we have to hide the car,” she said, mostly to herself.
“But wait, wait,” Jay said, “we need answers, and your incoherent friend has them. Can we just talk to him before we go?” Jay knelt by Willis, who was looking agitated, and began to speak in rapid-fire Pennsylvania Dutch while pointing at Martina.
“I am sorry,” Beanie said, perplexed, “he wants your book.”
Martina clutched her sketchbook to her chest. “No,” she whispered. “He can’t have it.”
“Not a problem, not a problem at all,” Jay said, opening up his backpack and pulling out a lined notebook and a pen. Willis snatched them and sat up on the couch, scribbling furiously. Everyone slowly crept closer to see what he was writing.
Nick looked at Farshad. “I’ve got no idea,” Farshad said.
“Fascinating,” Jay said.
“Is he, like, completely nuts now?” Cookie asked. “I mean, was he always like this or did Auxano make him this freaky?”
Rebecca looked like she was about to cry. “Willis?” she asked softly, putting her hand on his shoulder. He kept writing as if he hadn’t heard her. “Willis, vass is sell?” A tear rolled down her cheek. “What did they do to you?”
What did they do to all of us? Nick wondered, watching as Willis continued to scribble and mutter. He looked up and saw that Cookie was looking at him. Had she read his mind?